“May you live in interesting times” sounds like a friendly toast you hear at a wedding reception. However, the saying is actually an ironic “Chinese curse.” The irony? Interesting times are times of great change and challenge during which we move from one crisis to another. Indeed, times that aren’t interesting are peaceful and calm.

Fire-heated branding of farm animals originated in Egypt around 4,000 years ago as a technique to identify the owner of livestock. The practice of burning a symbol into the hide of cattle stayed fairly consistent for four millennia.

However, in recent years, other forms of livestock identification have been developed that are more humane and more effective, including freeze branding, inner lip or ear tattoos, earmarking, ear tagging, radio-frequency identification, and tagging with a microchip implant.

If you’re lucky, you’ve found one person at the organization you’re marketing your services to who is a champion for your solution. You’ll probably need that person to carry you on their back, like a Sherpa guiding you up a mountain, for a year. How can you help and encourage them along the way?

(Note: I may be breaking an Idea Email rule. Over the past five years, I’ve devoted a lot of space encouraging marketers to avoid hype and focus on help. Some of my colleagues think that by focusing on Hammock Inc., I’ve come close to the no-hype rule. I can understand their point. So we flipped a coin. I won.)

If you read how most marketing firms describe themselves these days, you might think “content” is a departmental bullet point on a long list of services that have replaced the words “advertising” and “public relations.”

What is failed marketing? It can be the inability to share a story that matters to the intended audience.

On Tuesday, voters in Nashville overwhelmingly rejected a proposed transit plan to address congestion in the fast-growing city (Hammock’s hometown, and home to many of you). There are many reasons why the referendum, despite its support from some of the city’s corporate forces, failed. But the lesson marketers should learn from the referendum is this: Don’t tell the wrong story.

In any marketplace, there are two phases in the relationship between a buyer and a seller: The “Why” phase and the “How” phase. During these two phases, the role of marketing with content is very different.

We’re all waking up to how much of our personal data is owned by other companies. We wanted the benefits and convenience offered by these online companies, but in the light of a new day, it doesn’t feel so good. Let’s just say that the hangover has set in.

While working on a video documentary about multigenerational family businesses, the director and I recently spent time visiting several fascinating people who returned home to run their family businesses after successful careers in other fields.

When talking to prospects and clients about their content marketing, we usually discuss various marketing automation platforms, such as Hubspot, Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Infusionsoft, etc. Companies often voice the following frustrations with these platforms:

The current blow to some digital marketing core beliefs caused by the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data breach is providing a much-needed moment of reflection on the reality vs. perception of a long list of digital marketing buzzwords like big data, adtech, SEO, retargeting, social-anything and dozens more.